Many "websites" don't actually support HTTP anymore, only HTTPS. Some also block user agents. Others are nothing but JS. It's hard to find real websites these days.

Try another Web Browser such as Opera or Firefox and see how that goes.

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

http://www.oldapps.com/opera.php?system=Windows_98

Caluser2000 wrote:

Try another Web Browser such as Opera 8,* or Firefox 2 and see how that goes.

Do I get those from oldversion or something? Having a hard time accessing that website too.

Just posted some links.

Found this https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/sear … /Web%20Browsers

Caluser2000 wrote:

Just posted some links.

Thank you!!
Trying MOzilla Firefox 2, I get a lot of queries about certificates. Like, on every page I load.
But you were right, more pages load now with it! So I thank you for your suggestions!

I understand I cannot browse the "normal" web like this but I am mostly interested in seeing stuff via the Wayback machine or Oocities.

Cool. The last link I posted looks interesting Browsers for NT 3.51/4, win95 and win98. There are sill a lot of older sites still available with the right searches. I found older IE versions never rendered pages compared to Opera or Firefox.

I might try the latest Opera on that list, 2009 is NOT BAD for a browser running on Windows 98!

Here are tons of old stuff: http://www.oldapps.com/

Forget about IE - nothing works with IE. Opera is rather a company than just a browser, they lead your traffic through their own proxy = show you ads, eventually modify your bookmarks and when they're in the right mood, they block you for good. Old Firefoxes (v3 from 2009?) are better re. java-script, can display flash and/or dl .mp4, plus you still find add-ons for this and that on the www. (I think uBlock is too young for FF2 or 3 but ad-block-plus may work.) Also try to modify your user-agent string to something modern, like 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0' to make more sites accept your browser without the 'Too old - go away'-nag-screen. The ultimate online-proof is login to gmail. If they let you in, everybody else will, too. Re. graphics: if your browser can handle .svg http://www.3quarks.com/en/SVGClock/ you're a winner.

Off-topic, but... I'm looking for a small XP prog or tool that does'nt consume all my RAM & can display svg on the desktop(?)

P.S.: The old DNS was/is IPv4, beeing replaced by IPv6 since 2000 a.D. or so. I don't really know (wikipedia is too vague), but meanwhile there may be sites that do only use IPv6 = no fallback to IPv4. If so, you're out, according to wikipedia IPv6 is not supported in Win prior to XP-SP1. Can someone with more knowledge than me comment this?

P.P.S.:

- I'm posting this from the system so this site works, but some times it doesn' t -

There is http://www.vogons.org/ = works and https://www.vogons.org/ = does'nt work (just an idea)

No idea when IPv6 was implemented in XP but found a site explaining how to enable it https://www.ghacks.net/2011/02/06/how-to-enab … -on-windows-xp/

I know Linux has supported going back to Red Hat 6.2 iirc.

New day, new luck: I've just learned, that my XP SP3 does'nt use IPv6 (by now, i did'nt care - everything is working). But it can do! In theory at least. When installing it (cmd+enter+ipv6 install+enter) i get the error 0x800f0203 = device not configured (which device?). Despite this failure XP now got a new service - claims to be working! - called IPv6 HelpService, in short ip6to4. On this site https://test-ipv6.com/ i tested it - no success. They say, that what my computer and/or browser can access is also depending on what protocol my ISP provides. So i'm stuck (i'm not mad enaugh to ask such stuff at the vodafone-hotline) ... However, this topic becomes far too technical for me, i do'nt understand even half of the IPv6 article in wikipedia ...

Caluser2000 wrote:

No idea when IPv6 was implemented in XP but found a site explaining how to enable it https://www.ghacks.net/2011/02/06/how-to-enab … -on-windows-xp/.

Hi, yes, XP supported IPv6 through its own IPV6 stack. It wasn't feature complete, though. DHCP v6 was missing, I believe.
Windows Vista overhauled this idea with its IPv4/6 Dual-Stack..

According to some sources, it is recommend to disable either IPv6 or IPv4 if not needed (except in case of dual stacks).
Reason is the risk of creation of an unmanaged "shadow network", especially with IPv6.
(IPv6 doesn't need need sub nets anymore, because of its end-to-end paradigm, ie. every computer in the universe can have its own IP.)
https://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/it … hadow-networks/

Jens wrote:

So to me it looks that the *real* challenge in staying online with old hardware is not http vs.
httpS but the change to IPv6 when all the IPv4-addresses are sold/used. However, this seems to become far too technical for me,
i do'nt understand even half of the IPv6 article in wikipedia ...

Simply said, the native IPv4 addresses will soon run out, which is an issue for some network applications.
Ordinary web-browsing should be no problem, though, since several IPv4-IPv6 translation methods do exist.
These do work fine for most things, but are slower and less flexible.

Natting (using NAT, network address translation) can also be used to circumwent the IPv4 shortage (in fact, this was used for years in order to avoid using IPv6).
It's basically some sort of combining several IPv4 machines to a single IP address.
Internet providers often do use that in order to connect their customers to the internet (IPv4).

"Real" problems do rather occur if an end-to-end connection is required. Like a video chat or a remote desktop connection use.
In that case, using IPv6 is the way to go, since free IPv4 addresses are really rare nowadays.

Website hosters are also in shortage of IPv4 sites, by the way.
For some reasons, big companies do prefer native IPv4 addresses over IPv6 ones.
At least in the western world. In the far east, IPv6 is quite popular already.

For DOS machines this shouldn't be a real issue, though.
At least not for our hobby machines. If everything breaks, we can use an Arduino (Mega or higher)
with Network Shield or an Raspberry Pi type of computer and let them do the translation.

If memory serves, some of the 8052 style microcontroller even come with a modern IP core in silicon,
so it shouldn't be too hard to let them do the IPv4/6 conversion.

@Jo22: So the essence of your appreciated comment is, that in, say, 2030 a.D. - presumed that no asteroid crashes in my living room, i stop smoking etc. - i'll probably still be able to visit ebay with my super XP-system, to buy new old trash as replacement for the old old trash i blew up by catching mysterious viruses and/or my very own *optimizations* ? Pls say *yes, sure* - this will save my day! As a motivation i'm enclosing some smilies: 😊 😊 😊

Your only real option with Win98 at this particular moment in time is...

RetroZilla 2.2

Get this and all your security protocol problems will be solved. But of course a lot of pages won't render quite right, a lot of new websites won't work, and videos won't load. But at least you'll be able to access things. And basic stuff works great.

RetroZilla is not very fast but it does work. Eventually I hope to see a new browser made which fully supports all the modern stuff and has a working JS engine.

keenmaster486 wrote:

Your only real option with Win98 at this particular moment in time is...

RetroZilla 2.2

I cannot acess github with Firefox 2 😢

Will download from another machine. Thanks!

If you want to use GitHub your only option is probably KernelEx with one of the newer Firefoxes... but that will be slow and flaky, and might not load at all due to HTTPS. The hacked-up K-Meleon 74 will probably work but it runs like a snail due to being a newer browser.

keenmaster486 wrote:

If you want to use GitHub your only option is probably KernelEx with one of the newer Firefoxes... but that will be slow and flaky, and might not load at all due to HTTPS. The hacked-up K-Meleon 74 will probably work but it runs like a snail due to being a newer browser.

I have no idea what KernelEx is, but I installed Retrozilla now, and I can atually acess Github to download files 😁

Looks really retro and seems to be easier on resources (Firefox was eating up all my RAM apparently), thanks so much for the suggestion!

It still asks me a LOT about accepting certificates every new website I visit, isn't there a way for it to accept all? I have "Client Certificate Selection" set to auto but it doesn't seem like it's working.

Other than that, this is a pretty damn perfect internet for what I wanted it to do!

Hmm, Retrozilla 2.2 (the newest version) shouldn't have the certificate problems, or at least it doesn't for me. Once in a while it will ask me about something but I just click OK and it goes away for a while.

I've done some testing with RetroZilla on Win95...and while it does display the pestilent TLS 1.2-only HTTPS-only websites that are slowly destroying the open web, it's less stable than the last "proper" Win9x-compatible Firefox and SeaMonkey releases. For this reason, I don't use it as my primary browser...I use it for fetching problematic URLs only.